1. Field of the Background
The present disclosure relates to lounge assemblies having features designed to support an electronic device that includes a display screen for use by an occupant of the lounge assembly and to afford a degree of privacy to a lounge occupant when viewing display screen content.
2. Description of the Background
Portable electronic devices, including smart phones and tablets, enable users to view digital content including, for instance, photos, records, documents, videos, films, advertisements, presentations, real time video of friends and colleagues wirelessly linked to the user's device during a video conference or telephone call, etc., and interact with software applications while away from home or an office. Increased accessibility and use of information has, in many cases, substantially increased work efficiencies as employees now have the ability to access and interact with content virtually all the time and regardless of location. Increased accessibility has also substantially increased the use of electronic devices for personal activities such as social networking, photo and video sharing, shopping, entertainment such as watching a movie, etc. Now, virtually any content or a face to face meeting with a remote colleague or friend is only a few gestures or screen interactions away.
While remote access using portable devices clearly has many advantages, there are several disadvantages associated with use of these devices in public. First, because portable devices are often used by people that are travelling, users of these devices often do not have access to a private space while viewing content and interacting with applications. For instance, many portable device users may access content while sitting in a public chair or lounge right next to another person. As another instance, device users may be located at a public table or even standing immediately adjacent a stranger when accessing content. Even in cases where a device user occupies a lounge chair spaced from others in a public space like an airport, other people are often moving about near the user and there is little privacy. In these cases many device users are reluctant to access sensitive information or participate fully in a video conference with others or, if they do fully access or participate, they may disclose sensitive or confidential information to strangers in their general area.
Second, where a portable device user speaks while participating in a video conference in a public space, the user's spoken words are often distracting and annoying to others in the user's general area. For instance, if a video conferee is located at an airport terminal while conversing during a conference, the conferee's voice will often annoy other adjacent people. Similarly, the voices of strangers adjacent or passing by a video conferee are often picked up by the user's device and can be confusing and annoying to the device user as well as to remote conferees. Exacerbating matters, during a video conference in a loud space like an airport terminal, device users tend to increase the volume of their voices when speaking to a relatively small portable device spaced away from the user's mouth in the loud environment and tend to increase the volume of the voice signals generated by their devices.
Third, most portable devices have a flat display screen and most flat display screens are optimally viewed head on (e.g., a user's line of sight is optimally perpendicular to the surface of the display). In addition, during video conferencing, in order to obtain video of a local device user for remote viewing that is most natural, it is optimal to have a portable device camera at about the eye level of the local device user (i.e., in front of the local device user's face). For this reason, for best use, a portable device often has to be supported to be juxtaposed so that the display surface faces a user's face and is perpendicular to the user's line of sight. Often a device user will manually hand hold a device in an optimal position in front of and aligned with the user's face. While this solution works in theory, in reality the solution is not very good as device users cannot maintain a device in the optimal position for very long. In most cases, after just a few minutes, a user hand holding a device experiences fatigue and has to change device juxtaposition or, in many cases, chooses to prop the device up on a table top or lays the device down on a table top so that the viewing angle is poor at best. In other cases a user may have a supporting device such as a device cover that can support the device in a somewhat vertical orientation which, again, is less than optimal.
Fourth, when viewing content on a display screen, ability to view a screen is often hampered by glare on the screen surface from lights or light passing through windows that subtends and reflects off the front of the screen surface. This is particularly true in large public spaces, many of which are intensely lighted and include many windows. While office or home spaces can be optimized to reduce glare, often portable device users do not have the option to customize their space to minimize glare.
Fifth, in cases where a portable device user is using a device for video conferencing, in order to generate optimal video of a local device user for remote conferees to view, a light pattern needs to be shown on the local user that illuminates the user in a certain manner most suitable for generating an optimal image without shadows or other artifacts. In public places lighting is often less than optimal. Similarly, when a device user is using a portable device to access content other than video of a remote conferee, optimal illumination usually includes a different light pattern than required for video conferencing.
To address all of the disadvantages of using portable devices in public spaces that are discussed above, public places would need to have private rooms or cubicle spaces to allow portable device users to use their devices without being overheard, interrupted, or observed and without disrupting or annoying others near the users. Unfortunately, separate rooms or cubicles are expensive and impractical and therefore most operators of public spaces will not provide private rooms for use by the general public.